Billionaire Charles Koch on fighting in the political arena

when charles koch took over the family business nearly half a century ago he had a vision for the oil company that his father founded i worked out okay how much can we grow over a period of time and projected that out through my life and two years ago we were 70 times that amount coke industries headquartered in a sprawling glass and granite campus in wichita is now the second largest private company in the country with more than a hundred thousand employees worldwide the conglomerate refines up to six 000 barrels of oil a day and produces everything from stainmaster carpets to electronic components for smartphones charles and his brother david own 84 percent of coke industries forbes estimates their net worth at nearly 43 billion dollars each but the sixth wealthiest man in the world still gets his lunch every day at the company cafeteria although it's a bit more challenging after recent foot surgery the 79 year old ceo is at his desk each morning at 7 15 a.m under the watchful eye of the family patriarch so this is your dad that's my dad yeah fred koch made his first fortune building refineries for stalin's soviet union and became a fervent anti-communist it may be either a blessing or a curse in his office charles keeps a framed letter fred wrote to his first two sons when he took out an insurance policy for them if you choose to let this money destroy your initiative and independence then it will be a curse to you and my action and giving it to you will have been a mistake so that's the way he was coke also inherited his father's distrust of big government and he's used his fortune to bankroll a network of conservative groups that helped give birth to the tea party movement that's made this billionaire and his brother among the most vilified men in american politics there's a cartoon you might joy run everybody run for your life it's them it's the koch brothers oh god the koch brothers and other money interests are influencing the political process for their own benefit among democrats like senator harry reid koch has become a code word for corporate villainy they're trying to buy america and it's time that the american people spoke out against this terrible dishonesty of these two brothers who are about as un-american as anyone that i can imagine some 53 000 attack ads out of state oil billionaires mentioned the koch brothers in the last election cycle if the coax and cassidy win louisiana loses like harry truman said if you can't stand the heat don't go in the kitchen but it's got to be unnerving on some level i knew i'd get heat but i didn't know it would be this vicious and this dishonest we're helping farmers feed the world but koch's now trying to give the family name an image makeover families worldwide rely on the daily essentials we helped make the company has launched a national ad campaign we are coke and in a new book good profit coke lays out the market-based management philosophy that drove his company's phenomenal success and writes about the values that drive him personally and politically one of four koch brothers charles went to mit like his father but not before bouncing around eight different schools what would you say the sort of source of your rebelliousness was i'm kind of a contrarian as you probably know from all the different things i do i do things differently than other people what are you doing that for you're just creating trouble for yourself the notoriously private billionaire agreed to his first in-depth tv interview at his wichita home what's like living with this guy interesting where we also met liz his wife of 42 years why are you the one brother still in wichita because my my father said either come back to run the company or i'm going to sell it and the others wanted to come back yeah but that's not the whole reason the real reason you could have moved many times you could have moved coke industries anywhere in the world you wanted to but this is a great place for raising children and running a business with values it was while he and liz were building their house here in 1973 that coke confronted his first major crisis as ceo the arab oil embargo i thought we might go broke you thought you might go bankrupt bankrupt was that the scariest time for the company well that and and the scariest for me when we had the takeover attempt by the stockholders or some my family and that was pretty scary and all the lawsuits that followed it that was pretty depressing in the early 80s the koch family broke into open civil war when bill and fred jr challenged their brothers for control of coke industries the battle would drag on for nearly two decades and while charles and david prevailed charles says the settlement prevents him from talking about it to spread his free market philosophy in the 70s coke co-founded the libertarian think tank the cato institute to advocate for a radically smaller government with reduced regulation and no subsidies but during the administration of president george w bush the kochs decided to get more active he's a fine person i'm sure he meant well then he he grew government more than just about any president before him and he got us in counterproductive wars so that's when i decided we needed to get into politics the koch brothers have helped fund a complex network of political action committees and advocacy groups many of them tax-exempt so donors don't have to be disclosed the network which now rivals the republican national committee in its financial clout will spend 300 million dollars in the next election year do you think it's good for the political system that so much what's called dark money is flowing into the process now well first of all my what i give isn't dark like what i give to politically that that's all reported it's either the pacs or to the candidates and what i give to my foundations is is is all public information but a lot of our donors don't want to take the kind of abuse that that i do they don't want these attacks they don't want the death threats so they aren't going to participate if they have to have their names associated with it but do you think it's healthy for the system that so much money is coming out of a relatively small group of people well i yeah listen if i didn't think it was healthy or fair i wouldn't do it because what what we're after is to fight against special interests some people would look at you and say you're a special interest yeah but my my interest is is just as it's been in business is is what will help people improve their lives and to get rid of these special interests that's the whole thing that drives me there are people out there who think what you're trying to do is essentially buy power but but but i i don't what i want is a system where there isn't as much centralized power where it's just dispersed to the people and that's everything i advocate points in that direction coke-backed groups were among the early donors to the tea party movement what do you think of the tea party well i think there's some good things and bad things to the extent the tea party is working to keep us from having a financial disaster then they're great if they're doing other things that are that are limiting people's choice and opportunity then they're not a lot of the groups that you've supported have essentially provided financial fertilizer for the tea party would you agree with that yes yes but that listen if we had to agree with everything a group or a person stood for we would never do anything some of the coke's causes might surprise you coke industries donated 25 million dollars to the united negro college fund the kochs have now joined the white house in calling for criminal justice reform to reduce prison sentences for non-violent offenders you've got the naacp and the koch brothers no you got to give him credit did you ever think he'd be working with the obama administration on anything yeah well i'm not i i feel the way frederick douglass did he said i'll work with anyone to do good and no one to do harm you don't really consider yourself a republican not at all no i consider myself a classical liberal the way i look at it the democrats are taking us at about 100 miles an hour over the financial cliff and and towards this two-tiered society and the republicans are taking us there at 70 miles an hour lesser of two evils well i don't like to put it that way i would say yeah less unproductive five republican presidential candidates including scott walker who since dropped out were invited to the koch brothers most recent donor meeting in august donald trump who was not on the guest list tweeted i wish good luck to all the republican candidates that traveled to california to beg for money etc from the koch brothers adding the word puppets with a question mark are you intending to support a candidate for president well it depends if donald trump got the nomination would you support him i made a vow i'm not going to talk about individuals because if i said just like david said he liked walker so now all the press is boy we put all this money behind walker and he had to drop out we didn't put a penny david said he liked him were you surprised walker's candidacy didn't resonate in any way well i thought it would resonate better but but uh he wasn't a very good campaigner so you may agree with us on a number of issues but if you're presenting them in a way that doesn't resonate that doesn't do any good so we can't support you that's we're not interested in in attacking windmills but charles koch is not about to abandon the fight behind that genial midwestern manner is a billionaire who sticks to his guns you've effectively made yourself a target yeah i got i i get a lot of death threats i'm now on al qaeda's hit list too so that's that's really getting in the big time it's pretty scary that hasn't stopped you no i i decided long ago i'd rather die for something and live for nothing our conversation with charles koch continues tomorrow on cbs this morning

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

Views: 361,084

Keywords: video, cbs, news, republican, tea, party, koch, democrat, congress

Id: wAJeqbaMv6c

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2015